Not quite equal to Eisenberg’s All Around Atlantis (1997), but she’s still the closest thing there is to an American Alice...
Complex relationships and troubling histories are skillfully telescoped in Eisenberg’s new collection of six urbane, probing stories.
Contemporary angst is sharply portrayed when a shallow young woman joins an unpleasant family reunion called to deal with her stroke-ridden grandmother, a formerly brilliant, active woman who’s now a helpless (though not clueless) ruin (“Revenge of the Dinosaurs”), and in the title story about four Manhattan “friends” who sublet a spacious, perfect apartment, until 9/11 destroys their insular “world” along with the larger one they only dimly inhabit. Eisenberg handles such matters assuredly (though the title story does lapse into needless authorial commentary), but she seems out of her element in “Like It Or Not,” in which an unhappily divorced schoolteacher experiences Rome in the company of a self-declared art guide who is himself escaping a privileged life of which he feels unworthy. “Window,” however, departs intriguingly from this author’s usual turf, in the increasingly tense story of a young, single mother’s destroyed hope for happiness with a sexy survivalist who gradually reveals both criminal proclivities and a compulsion to abuse women. “The Flaw in the Design” subtly discloses how “the things that are hidden” in several lives gnaw at and threaten a straying wife, her dull, “successful” husband and their brilliant, accusatory, unstable college-age son. But the gem is “Some Other, Better Otto,” a stunning exfoliation of emotional detail in which a 60ish attorney, unstrung by the demands and needs of his scattered siblings, receives more compassion and understanding than he yearns for or deserves from his endlessly kind, selfless male lover.
Not quite equal to Eisenberg’s All Around Atlantis (1997), but she’s still the closest thing there is to an American Alice Munro. And this is one fine source for Woody Allen to mine for his next New York movie.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-374-29941-2
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2005
It's being called a novel, but it is more a hybrid: short-stories/essays/confessions about the Vietnam War—the subject that O'Brien reasonably comes back to with every book. Some of these stories/memoirs are very good in their starkness and factualness: the title piece, about what a foot soldier actually has on him (weights included) at any given time, lends a palpability that makes the emotional freight (fear, horror, guilt) correspond superbly. Maybe the most moving piece here is "On The Rainy River," about a draftee's ambivalence about going, and how he decided to go: "I would go to war—I would kill and maybe die—because I was embarrassed not to." But so much else is so structurally coy that real effects are muted and disadvantaged: O'Brien is writing a book more about earnestness than about war, and the peekaboos of this isn't really me but of course it truly is serve no true purpose. They make this an annoyingly arty book, hiding more than not behind Hemingwayesque time-signatures and puerile repetitions about war (and memory and everything else, for that matter) being hell and heaven both. A disappointment.
Pub Date: March 28, 1990
ISBN: 0618706410
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: Oct. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1990
SEEN & HEARD
IN THE NEWS
SEEN & HEARD
A newcomer to watch: fresh, funny, and tough.
Seven stories, including a couple of prizewinners, from an exuberantly talented young Thai-American writer.
In the poignant title story, a young man accompanies his mother to Kok Lukmak, the last in the chain of Andaman Islands—where the two can behave like “farangs,” or foreigners, for once. It’s his last summer before college, her last before losing her eyesight. As he adjusts to his unsentimental mother’s acceptance of her fate, they make tentative steps toward the future. “Farangs,” included in Best New American Voices 2005 (p. 711), is about a flirtation between a Thai teenager who keeps a pet pig named Clint Eastwood and an American girl who wanders around in a bikini. His mother, who runs a motel after having been deserted by the boy’s American father, warns him about “bonking” one of the guests. “Draft Day” concerns a relieved but guilty young man whose father has bribed him out of the draft, and in “Don’t Let Me Die in This Place,” a bitter grandfather has moved from the States to Bangkok to live with his son, his Thai daughter-in-law, and two grandchildren. The grandfather’s grudging adjustment to the move and to his loss of autonomy (from a stroke) is accelerated by a visit to a carnival, where he urges the whole family into a game of bumper cars. The longest story, “Cockfighter,” is an astonishing coming-of-ager about feisty Ladda, 15, who watches as her father, once the best cockfighter in town, loses his status, money, and dignity to Little Jui, 16, a meth addict whose father is the local crime boss. Even Ladda is in danger, as Little Jui’s bodyguards try to abduct her. Her mother tells Ladda a family secret about her father’s failure of courage in fighting Big Jui to save his own sister’s honor. By the time Little Jui has had her father beaten and his ear cut off, Ladda has begun to realize how she must fend for herself.
A newcomer to watch: fresh, funny, and tough.Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2005
ISBN: 0-8021-1788-0
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Grove
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2004
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